[ADAPTED FROM MY BOOK COVERING AMERICA, chap 15.]

 

REVOLUTIONS AND EVOLUTIONS

How is it that, without a printing press or a broadcast pipe, by sharing something with a few friends, I can reach millions of people?
–Jonah Peretti


Following the lead of pioneers like Arianna Huffington, more and more digital natives began creating new sites for journalism online. One of the most successful was Jonah Peretti, a restless, curious young man from California. Born in Oakland in 1974, Peretti applied himself to one of the central issues involved in putting journalism online: what kind of news do people want to share with their friends?
After graduating from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 1996, he taught school for a few years in New Orleans, then entered the celebrated graduate program at the MIT Media Lab, an institution devoted to disrupting old media. One day in 2001, while he was supposed to be working on his master’s thesis about learning and technology, he was surfing the internet and noticed a marketing campaign by Nike. The sportswear giant was conducting a promotion – called Nike iD – that invited customers to personalize a pair of shoes with a slogan of their own printed on them. Peretti, a self-described “smart-ass” seeking to mock the company for its Third World labor practices, tried to customize his Nike shoes with the word SWEATSHOP. Nike balked and sent him an email of bureaucratic mush suggesting that his request was “inappropriate.” Peretti persisted.

Dear NIKE iD,
Thank you for your quick response to my inquiry about my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes. Although I commend you for your prompt customer service, I disagree with the claim that my personal iD was inappropriate slang. After consulting Webster’s Dictionary, I discovered that “sweatshop” is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: “a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions” and its origin dates from 1892. So my personal iD does meet the criteria detailed in your first email. Your web site advertises that the NIKE iD program is “about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are.” I share Nike’s love of freedom and personal expression. The site also says that “If you want it done right . . . build it yourself.” I was thrilled to be able to build my own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my vision. I hope that you will value my freedom of expression and reconsider your decision to reject my order.
Thank you, Jonah Peretti

The email chain lengthened. Then, Peretti sent the corporate emails from Nike to some friends. One of the friends posted the email chain on his website. People noticed. Click. Click. Share. Click-share-click-share-chickshareclickshareclick . . . Suddenly, Peretti was present at the creation of one of the first episodes of something “going viral” on the internet. Fascinated, he had found his life’s work.
From MIT, Peretti went to New York City and joined a startup called the Eyebeam art and technology center. He devoted his attention to the phenomenon of “contagious media” – those things that people find online that they not only enjoy but also pass along to their own networks. Peretti wanted to master the new art of causing cascades through networks. He devoted his energy to something he called the “Bored at Work Network” – all those alienated office workers worldwide who had time to kill during the workday while staring at their desktop computers and trying to look busy. Based on his experience, Peretti distilled in emerging philosophy in a manifesto he called “Notes on Contagious Media.” It consisted of 23 numbered paragraphs, each of which makes an assertion about the nature of viral content. Several key passages:

5 Contagious media is best understood from a social perspective. It does not matter if it is an email, a movie, or a game. What matters is how it diffuses virally through human-powered networks.

9 Contagious media is defined by its audience, not its author. The audience decides if a particular project is art, activism, or entertainment. The audience decides if the project reaches 10 people or 10 million people. The audience is the network and the critic.

13 To be successful, contagious media projects must be explainable in one sentence or less: “A phone line for rejecting unwanted suitors”; “A site to rate people based on if they are hot or not” . . . If you need more than a sentence to describe a project, you should probably not bother.

Tall and thin, Peretti could usually be seen wearing “smart-looking” glasses and carrying himself with an air of ironic amusement. A casual but intentional dresser, he projected an image of curated dishevelment. He conveyed the sense that he is not just interacting with people but also simultaneously processing the metadata about the interaction. Indeed, he started to see people – especially people in networks – as objects of study. Even before there was a Facebook or a YouTube, Peretti was working on the networking – or social – dimension of the internet. “I started to just try to understand, how does this stuff work? How is it that, without a printing press or a broadcast pipe, by sharing something with a few friends, I can reach millions of people?”

That very question lay at the heart of the new challenges facing everyone involved in journalism. Starting about 2005, the environment for practicing journalism changed again, forcing every species of journalist to adapt or face extinction. The conditions of journalism evolved in directions that shaped both sides of the enterprise – gathering the news and disseminating the news. There were four key developments:
–the spread of high-speed, broadband internet connections, which in turn enabled the use of video and the practice of two-way interactivity.
–the emergence of new platforms, including tablets and smartphones, which in turn contributed to a world in which digital media became ubiquitous, commanding more attention in many Americans’ lives than the physical world.
–the explosion of social media, which not only brought many people together with “friends” new and old, but also created the networks that make it possible for catchy or powerful stories to “go viral.”
–the arrival of “metrics” – the new data that allow journalists to measure, track, and count every story, video, and photo – in a trend that has given new urgency to the old question of journalism’s purpose: is it to entertain or to inform, or some combination of both?

Taken together, those four changes – broadband, platforms, social media, and metrics – transformed the ecology of journalism by the second decade of the twenty-first century. In just a few years, those powerful trends began to drive change throughout the environment for news, challenging the legacy media and helping to give rise to a host of innovative new “native” digital media. The choices people made in the new environment would determine the future of news. For users, many of those choices were driven by boredom, curiosity, or profits. For journalists, many of those choices were existential. The new ecology of journalism put more distance than ever between the emerging media and the traditional forms of printed newspapers and magazines, terrestrial radio, and broadcast television. News became ever more instantaneous, continuous, and out of anyone’s control. For more and more users, more and more often, news arrived unbidden – coming from a friend on Facebook, or from a provocative source on Twitter, or from a stranger who had paid to reach them via phone, tablet, or some other platform.

* * *

In this changed environment, journalists faced a paradox. On the one hand, most of the institutions of journalism, especially those “legacy” operations with a pre-digital past, were struggling or dying. In the early twenty-first century, Americans deserted the newspaper in droves, declining to renew subscriptions to printed papers, leaving many small and mid-sized newspapers devastated. People told pollsters that they did not trust the news media. Newspapers (and even some digital sites) shrank, closed, merged, or got swallowed up into larger entities. Local television news declined in ambition and reach, relying more and more on news provided to them by government agencies – weather, traffic, and crime. As for radio, with the notable exception of National Public Radio and the occasional all-news format AM station, the news on radio barely existed any more.
On the other hand, most of the practices of journalism, especially those created in recent years specifically for the internet, were flourishing. In the early 21st century, journalists found more and better tools for everything they wanted to do, from drone-based cameras to video-editing software – all requiring new skills. “Digital native” sites grew and started offering serious salaries and even employee benefits. Upstart online-only news outlets like ProPublica began winning Pulitzer Prizes. Even as newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters continued to retrench, individual journalists and some of the start-up news sites were doing admirable work. The digital pioneer Esther Dyson observed: “There’s a holy church of journalism, which isn’t doing that well. But there is, if you like, the faith, or the religion of journalism, which is searching for the truth. That still exists and it will persist.” Individual churches might collapse or move, but the faith will survive.


* * *
The fundamental fact facing almost all legacy news media was this: the news media became dependent on money from advertising, and now that money has gone away. A corollary: When ads were plentiful, consumers of news got used to paying much less than the full cost of gathering and editing all that news, and now they must face up to whether they want to pay the real price. Even while the overall economy was recovering from the Great Recession that began in 2008, total newspaper advertising revenue continued to evaporate. In retrospect, it appeared that peak revenue for newspapers occurred sometime in 2005 and 2006. In those years, total ad revenue was just below $50 billion – of which about 95 percent came from the traditional source of advertisers paying to buy space in the newspapers’ printed editions. That was it – the all-time high-water mark for a business model that had really gotten going in the 1830s. By 2016, total revenue for the newspaper industry was just under $20 billion – a drop of about 60 percent from a decade earlier. The bulk of that smaller advertising pie still came from print ad sales – which constituted about 82 percent of the total. At the same time, digital ad sales were rising, but from a very low starting point and at a slow pace. Digital ads contributed a bigger proportion of total revenues not because they were growing but because they were not shrinking.
Not surprisingly, the size of the newsroom workforce in the nation’s newspapers fell relentlessly in the same decade. From a recent peak in 2006 of 55,000 reporters and editors, the ranks of newspaper journalists plunged to fewer than 33,000 ten years later. In other words, employment contracted by about one-third, and about 22,000 newsroom jobs vanished. Some of the lost newsroom positions were made up elsewhere – at new digital ventures and in some expansion at NPR and some television stations. But many of those old jobs simply ceased to exist, which caused a decade of painful layoffs, buy-outs, and firings. It also further weakened those newspapers’ capacity to hold powerful people accountable, as they had to cut the size of their city hall and state house bureaus and pull back from expensive undertakings like covering war, corporate mischief, international news, and investigations.
All the retrenchment and misery in the legacy media was somewhat offset by gains in the money coming to newspapers from the other traditional revenue stream: circulation – that is, charging readers money for the right to read. After years of expecting news on the Web to be free, readers eventually began to decide that all that content might actually be worth paying for. Slowly, credit cards came out and digital subscription rates began to rise.

* * *

While the legacy news media were struggling, the digital natives were proliferating. They had no printing presses that needed ink. They owned no fleets of delivery trucks that needed diesel fuel. They did not need access to cable television. They owed nobody any pension benefits and often did not fund anybody’s health care, either. And they almost never had stockholders looking for regular and growing dividends. Thus, the digital news sites could survive on a comparative trickle of revenue. They had, in short, the right metabolism for the new ecology. They did not do “process” stories (BILL ADVANCES TO NEXT COMMITTEE) or stories “for the record” (THAI PRIME MINISTER ENDURES). Especially during the Obama years, a second generation of digital natives not only succeeded in journalism but also thrived. Like Arianna Huffington, most of them did not come from a hard-news journalism background. Instead of boasting about the newspapers they used to work for, the digital natives talked about generating buzz, churning their metrics, and “winning the internet.” Huffington and the rest of the new generation brought a new sensibility to journalism – restless, irreverent, ferociously fast. Their sites were buzzy and visual and, above all, social, featuring irresistible headlines – known as “clickbait” – that just begged to be shared on social networks. In a war of all against all, they competed at the level of the individual story, slideshow, and headline to gain currency in the new “attention economy.” That approach explained much of the growth of the Huffington Post, which grew from a vanity project to a giant news-and-opinion source, as well as the rise of BuzzFeed, Breitbart, Mashable, Vice, Jezebel, The Undefeated, and many others.

While HuffPo was surging to the front, one of its founders, Jonah Peretti, was already losing interest. What he wanted to know was not what’s new but what’s viral. To Peretti, that question was more compelling than building the HuffPo brand. Despite the excitement of participating in Arianna Huffington’s widely watched startup in lower Manhattan, Peretti was soon bored at work, so in November 2006 he began devoting one day a week to a side project that he called BuzzFeed.
Initially, Peretti thought of it as a new, “internet popularity contest,” and the challenge was to see how many people he could reach and, later, how many of them he could connect to each other in a new, shifting network. In the old days of analog things, a newspaper entered a home or an apartment, and it was an inert object. One or several people read it, and they might comment to each other about an item or two. End of story. The newspaper’s customers were linked to the central node but not to each other. Same with radio and television. They all operated networks, but they were one-directional, sending information and images from a central node to isolated customers. In that one-to-many model, the audience could almost never send a message back to the central source. And audience members could almost never find each other – unless they met in a bar or some other public space and the talk happened to turn to the news.

In the early days at BuzzFeed, Peretti struggled to help the site evolve and adapt to the digital environment. It looked much easier in retrospect than it did as a startup. One issue was video. How could it be optimized for smartphones? How could videos be shared? Could a BuzzFeed video play directly on a platform like Facebook, or would a viewer always have to follow a link back to BuzzFeed’s home page? Another issue was the problem of the ubiquitous (and annoying) banner ad. They were bad enough on a desktop or a laptop, but they did not translate well to the much smaller screens of mobile phones. Like everyone else, Peretti was stumped. Eventually, he turned away from banner ads altogether as artifacts of the print era. Since the days when Macy’s and Gimbel’s had bought full-page ads in the New York World, displaying text and images to sell things had gone unquestioned. Now, Peretti decided that they were so annoying to users that they were not worth the money. All the while, he was devoting more and more time to BuzzFeed, shifting from one day a week to four. When HuffPo sold in 2011, he devoted his full time and energy to BuzzFeed.
Eventually, Peretti and the team at BuzzFeed began to see the possibilities in journalism. News was something that, under the right circumstances, people wanted to share on their own networks. When Peretti and his team started noticing that people were posting more and more news articles on Facebook or linking more news stories on Twitter, they realized that journalism could be just as share-able as K-pop dance videos.

At BuzzFeed, reporting was not an end in itself; reporting was useful so long as it advanced the company’s overarching goal – to get its content shared around the world and across platforms. The goal, Peretti has said many times, is for BuzzFeed to be global, social, and mobile. That is, he wanted to get the most out of the inherent advantage of the internet, which is free, frictionless distribution. He wanted to capitalize on social media, which enabled users to distribute BuzzFeed content far beyond the reach it would have otherwise. Above all, he wanted BuzzFeed content to be designed with mobile devices in mind, so that it would load well and look good on the world’s billions of smartphones.
Another key to BuzzFeed’s success was a new attitude toward advertising. When Peretti turned his back on display ads, the question was how to replace them. One method could be subscriptions, but curtailing access to the site would undercut the goal of going viral and goading users to distribute BuzzFeed content as widely as possible. The answer that Peretti and his team hit upon was a version of native advertising. Some legacy news organizations were also using native advertising, but they do so reluctantly, afraid that it represents a breach in the traditional wall separating “church and state” within news organizations. Peretti is something of an agnostic. As he put it:

I agree wholeheartedly that church and state is really important. The thing I don’t like about the church/state division, as someone who sits above the divide, is that it can lead to a two-tiered system where the journalists are seen as the whole purpose and greatness of everything, and that the people in advertising are seen as a necessary evil. . .

Instead, Peretti embraced native advertising, to the point where there was no separation between ads and stories. Many ads were simply transformed editorially into a quiz or a personality test that just happens to feature brand names. Thus, “Can You Shop at IKEA Without Blowing Your Budget?” or “How Well Do You Know Your Sephora Prices?”
Less visible than ads or content but perhaps more important, BuzzFeed’s true advantage was its use of data. BuzzFeed was just as concerned about the incoming data as the outgoing data. Like everyone else in the news media, BuzzFeed has a home page, and many readers go there to find stories. Like some companies, BuzzFeed also has its own apps that facilitate finding its content on mobile devices. And like very few other companies, BuzzFeed takes advantage of social media to develop a “distributed model” in which many people encounter BuzzFeed content by finding a single story shared on their social network, even if they never visit the BuzzFeed homepage. All the while, data flows back to BuzzFeed about who is sharing what, and why. The goal at BuzzFeed is to learn something every time content is shared, which is not a priority (or even a possibility) at many legacy news media. Peretti is an evangelist for iterative thinking: try something and learn from it.

Ultimately, the point of “buzz” was to learn how to get better at generating buzz. In one case, the results were dramatic. In February 2015, a blogpost appeared on Tumblr showing a dress made of material in two colors. A BuzzFeed editor who monitors Tumblr noticed that there was a lot of traffic around the dress. Some people saw it as black and blue; others saw it as white and gold. BuzzFeed posted a simple poll on the evening of February 26, inviting readers to judge the colors for themselves. The result was an episode in the madness of crowds. The number of concurrent visitors to the BuzzFeed site peaked at 673,000. Twitter exploded too. At its height, the hashtag “TheDress” appeared in 11,000 tweets per minute, and it soon turned into a bonafide global phenomenon. The Washington Post called it “the drama that divided a planet.” Was any of this journalism? Hard to say, but it seems likely that publishers of popular newspapers like Benjamin Day or Joseph Pulitzer would have appreciated it, even while most of the journalistic establishment either snickered or ignored it.

Buzzfeed was described as an “insane morphing rocket ship” and as “the most important news organization in the world.” On the other hand, it was condemned as “the single biggest threat to journalism ever created.” It was never intended to provide a one-stop comprehensive accounting of the world’s doings. In that sense, BuzzFeed is not really in the big-time news business. But it is important to understand that Peretti is not a zany and irresponsible imitator of a serious journalist.

It was not the case that he was trying to make BuzzFeed into the New York Times and failing at it. Like Pulitzer, Luce, or Ted Turner before him, he was trying to reimagine the definition of news and reinvent the mechanism for delivering it. On his own terms, he was, for a time, a raging success. A few years ago, BuzzFeed had 7 billion monthly global views of its content, more than 200 million monthly visitors to its website, more than 90 million unique monthly visitors from outside the United States, about 1,500 employees worldwide (mostly in New York and Los Angeles), and a growing number of bureaus around the world. At the same time, it must be noted that BuzzFeed news did not serve any particular locality or try to keep any state or local government honest.

Instead, the goal was long-term sustainability. After losing money for many years running, BuzzFeed began turning a profit in 2013. It is not a publicly traded company, so details are not easy to come by. According to one estimate, the company’s annual ad revenue was about $100 million, which is not much by the standards of big media. Nevertheless, BuzzFeed was on a growth trajectory that made it very attractive to investors. In the summer of 2015, the old-media company Comcast bought a stake in BuzzFeed that lifted its estimated value to $1.5 billion. That should have made BuzzFeed news sustainable for a while. . . .



p.s. I wrote that in 2017, and I was proven wrong just six years later. This may be why historians should stick to the past and leave the future to others.

Antebellum Ideologies of Liberation

By Christopher B. Daly

March 25, 2022 / Boston University

INTRO

In this essay, I will be presenting some highlights from a new book I am working on, called The Democratic Art. That book is an exploration of how, between the 1840s and the end of WWII, the newsrooms of America served as ports of entry and incubators for many major figures in American literature and the visual arts.

Today, I want to focus is on three bold figures active before the Civil War: Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass.

All three were successors to the Founding generation. All three were journalists. All three helped formulate a sweeping new agenda for social justice.

In brief, the Founders had engaged in a rights revolution that we might call “leveling down.” That is, among the goals articulated in their pamphlets, in the Declaration, and in the Constitution were some truly revolutionary changes to British society: no monarchy, no hereditary aristocracy, no primogeniture. We might think of that bundle of changes as “topping” the upper reaches of society. That is: rank, titles, and power would all be capped. The result (for propertied white males at least) would be a society whose upper ranks would be relatively broad and much less steep than the upper ranks of British society.

After the Revolution, however, it is important to note that the lower ranks of American society remained at least as unequal as those in Britain.

–Indentured servitude was widespread.

–Women and girls were treated as appurtenances of males.

–The population of enslaved chattel was subject to routine brutality.

So, while the American Revolution deserves its place in the history of liberating individuals and making society, as a whole, somewhat less unequal, much remained to be done.

         Between 1845 and 1855, a cohort of loosely connected allies radically widened the agenda for freedoms. Freedoms that were personal, intimate, and innate. This trio of journalist-activists demanded nothing less than an end to sexism, homophobia, and racism.

Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and Frederick Douglass emerged to me as heroes. In their writings, they all pointed the way to a fairer and freer world. Fuller battled sexism; Douglass battled racism; Whitman, in his way, battled homophobia. They raised their voices to promote the idea that each individual matters and that each individual has an equal right to self-determination. Like leaves of grass, none are taller, better, or more important. But also like leaves of grass, none are lesser, inferior, or unimportant.

In their time, Fuller, Douglass, and Whitman took republican democracy as a starting point and envisioned a leveling in an upward social direction – no more enslaved people, no more second-class citizens. All are one. All are not identical, but all are equal in worth and dignity.

FULLER

First, Fuller. Born in 1810, Margaret Fuller was the oldest child of Timothy Fuller, a prosperous lawyer and member of Congress representing Cambridge, Massachusetts. He poured all his talents and energy into educating Margaret, up to the point where the boys her age were preparing to enter Harvard and other colleges. But with no college in America accepting girls at the time, Margaret faced a closed door. She tried many stratagems to keep pace with the men her age – beginning with teaching.

At the time, a paradox defined the status of most women. They were supposed to live up to two conflicting ideals.

After thinking about her own situation and ransacking the pages of classic and contemporary literature, Fuller put forth a bold agenda. In her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she took up the question her own life presented: why are women treated so poorly?

On the one hand, women, especially middle- and upper-class women, were considered delicate flowers who needed to be sheltered from the filth and strife of activities like business, the military, and politics. They were expected to be virgins until marriage. After that, they were expected to become the center of the home, where they would provide moral uplift and basic education to a large number of children.

At the same time, women, especially working-class and poor women, were also considered beasts of burden who should cook, clean, wash, nurse, and meet the needs of others all the livelong day and well into the night. They were seen by men as sturdy, dirty, and flirty. In almost no case did men consider it worthwhile to educate girls; they were too often seen as ruled by feminine “sensibility” (emotions) and not by manly “sense” (reason).

Education would be wasted on girls. Even worse, it might leave them discontented with their lot in life.

In her Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller raised key questions: Why should men exercise a power that amounts to legal conservatorship over women? Why should women be relegated to the status of children or mental defectives?

Fuller advanced two remarkable arguments. First, she argued, men and women are not opposites, and one sex is not superior to the other. Indeed, she said the evidence suggests that men and women are complementary and that the elements of the gender extremes are usually present in everyone, to varying degrees. Thus, she continued, most men are “womanly” to some extent, and most women are “manly” to some extent.

In other words, everyone is a mixed case of attributes. Since the sexes are not fixed at opposite poles, there is no basis for saying that one sex is suited only for certain activities —  and therefore no basis for denying members of either sex the opportunity to find out what they are good at. Not everyone will be equally adept at all things, but we will never know if we don’t let individuals find out for themselves. Of course, it stands to reason, then, that girls should be educated alongside boys. Given a chance, she wrote, there was nothing that women could not do. In a famous formulation, she wrote: “Let them be sea-captains if they like!”

WHITMAN

         Next, Whitman. Born in 1819 into a downwardly mobile family in Brooklyn, young Walt went to school for a few years, then began to learn the printer’s trade. Like many bright boys with nimble fingers, he started by learning to set type, working at New York City’s growing roster of newspapers, magazines, and book publishers.

         Throughout much of the 1840s, while he was in his 20s, Whitman was composing his poetic masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855. During that drafting period, we know that he was reading Fuller and Douglass.

We also know that Walt Whitman loved men.[i] Of that there is no doubt. But almost every other aspect of Whitman’s sexual life is shrouded in mystery, red herrings, misconceptions, hints and rumors, claims and counter-claims, along with outright fabrications. We also know for sure that Whitman never married.

Of course, the text can be considered separate from the man. But I believe that when an author declares again and again that his main poetic purpose is to compose and sing songs of himself, then we cannot help but ask: OK, poet, just who are you anyway?

For Whitman, in matters of love and sex, the stakes were very high – both for his actions and for his words. During Whitman’s lifetime, it was illegal in New York state for a man to have sex with another man. Moreover, as Whitman well knew, a sizable portion of the population considered sexual acts between men repugnant. Indeed, the very terms “gay” and “homosexual” as we understand them were not part of the nineteenth century American consciousness or vocabulary. So, in trying to reveal himself as a man who loved men, Whitman had to be somewhat circumspect.

By his own accounts, he knew quite a few men intimately. In New York, he was a frequent rider of the horse-drawn omnibuses, even when he had no particular place to go, just so he could meet the drivers. He knew all the bus teamsters and spent a lot of time with them – “not only for comradeship, and sometimes affection.”

Looking back years later, Whitman added: “I suppose the critics will laugh heartily, but the influence of those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades undoubtedly entered into the gestation of Leaves of Grass.”

In his debut edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman downplayed the homoerotic elements of his life and poetry. It was not until the 1860 edition that he dared to include the “Calamus” cluster of poems, which are replete with phallic imagery and passionate promises to one or more male lovers.

In an essay on the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth in 1819, the author and critic Jeremy Lybarger argued that Whitman’s homosexuality was key to his development as a poet: 

. . . The Whitman who remains most central to whatever has become of the “American experiment” is the poet who cruised the streets of New York, who skinny-dipped with rough trade, who caroused in pick-up bars and lowdown dives, who ministered to the bodies of young soldiers, who loafed with boys in the fields and backwoods of a perpetual frontier.

In the end, with such a sparse record about the sex life of such a complex character, there may be no simple answer to Whitman’s sexuality and its consequences. But I think that, as always, Whitman was himself pointing us to an answer.

Even considering the standards of literary decorum and good taste in the Victorian era, Leaves of Grass was quite daring about sex. Whitman was actually quite frank and even bold.

Throughout, he not only praises sexuality in general. He not only hails the bodies (and body parts) of both the male and the female. He also leaves behind flags and emblems telling readers that he himself is not only heterosexual, he’s also homosexual, pansexual, and sometimes beyond-sexual. Whitman gives us the sense that if he could, he would make love to the whole world – one by one, or all at once! This attitude underlies his pervasive sense of solidarity with all people. Like Fuller and Douglass, Whitman resisted all invidious distinctions, declaring, for example, that “I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.”

Just a peek into his vast masterpiece:

The section we now know as “I Sing the Body Electric” is a chant for equality – between the sexes, between the races, between the slave and the free. Whitman says we all have these amazing bodies; that alone makes us equal. He shares with readers a glimpse of his “loveflesh swelling and deliciously aching / Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous . . .  / quivering jelly of love”

For all his frankness, though, Whitman could not possibly have written an explicit manifesto for gay rights in the midst of the Victorian era. Given that same-sex sex was widely considered a sin or a crime or both, he was boldly telling the world to think anew.

DOUGLASS

         Finally, Douglass. Born into slavery, likely in 1818, Douglass essentially taught himself to read and write – skills forbidden to almost all enslaved people. At age 20, he liberated himself from enslavement in Maryland and made his way north. He joined the organized abolition movement, becoming a popular paid speaker bearing witness to the horrors he knew from his upbringing. When he tired of telling his story over and over again, he decided to write it down. The result was his great Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the first of three autobiographies he would write. He published it in 1845 – the same year Fuller published Woman in the 19^th Century.

Naturally, Douglass was a fierce opponent of slavery. But it’s worth noting what kind of opponent he was. Douglass was a radical abolitionist. That meant several concrete things:

• He demanded immediate emancipation (no gradualism; no compensation)
• He demanded full equal rights (no colonization or return to Africa)

In 1847, he became a “movement journalist” – publisher, editor, and writer of the North Star, a weekly abolitionist newspaper in Rochester, New York.

In 1848, he traveled to nearby Seneca Falls to take part in the first convention devoted to women’s rights, inspired in part by Margaret Fuller’s book of three years earlier. Douglass was not the only man at the gathering, but he was the only Black delegate.

Douglass remained a steadfast, public supporter of women’s rights for the rest of his life as well as a personal friend to Anthony and other suffragists.

CONCLUSION

         To bring this all to a point.

In 1851, Douglass merged his North Star with another paper and brought forth a new publication, which he candidly titled Frederick Douglass’ Paper. For that new newspaper, he also rolled out a new motto:

                  ALL RIGHTS FOR ALL.

Hear that:

                  ALL RIGHTS FOR ALL.

There, in four words, Douglass encapsulated the most expansive social-justice agenda possible. Taken literally, it would mean an end not just to slavery but also to racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of oppression. It could serve as the rallying cry for all the progressive movements that were to come.

Together, then, Fuller, Whitman, and Douglass had laid out a broad challenge: it was not enough to lower the top end of society. It was just as urgent to raise up the bottom.

All rights for all.

All are not identical, but all are equal in worth and dignity. This was one of the main meanings of Whitman’s notion of “leaves of grass.” Society should be broad; it should be diverse; but none should tower over others. None should be permanently subjugated. None should be despised for being themselves.

Together, those three antebellum radical journalists outlined an agenda of personal liberation that we are still working to fully realize.

That was – and is – the great project. All Rights for All.

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[i] This discussion of Whitman’s sexuality draws on a large and growing body of scholarly and critical work that has emerged in tandem with the modern gay rights movement. For about a century, the subject little attention – either because scholars and critics considered it taboo or because they found that Whitman’s expressions of love for men, while exuberant, fell within the nineteenth-century understanding of same-sex affections. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, discussions of Whitman’s sexuality have become more numerous and more frank. Throughout this section, I draw on works by David S. Reynolds, Justin Kaplan, Jerome Loving, Hugh Ryan, Ed Folsom, Ted Genoways, Betsy Erkkila, Martin Murray, and others.

As the latest land war in Europe grinds on in Ukraine, the fighting extends well beyond the military combat on the ground. Both sides are also waging a propaganda war — an old tactic updated with an array of new weapons and techniques.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as a master communicator, using social media platforms to bypass Russian censorship and communicate to the Ukrainian people. In his Instagram and Twitter posts and videos, he has outwitted Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, and managed to capture the world’s attention with his direct and honest messaging — a feat in an age of snark and fakery. In this way, Zelensky has succeeded in showing the world that Ukraine — far from being a lost colony welcomed back to Mother Russia — is the victim of a war of aggression that was unprovoked and has been, so far, unsuccessful. In doing so, he is building on a wartime playbook advanced by the United States and other countries during World War II: mobilizing new communications technology as a weapon of war.

U.S. wartime propaganda from World War II played an important role in training troops, enhancing civilian morale and raising money for the war effort. Consider, for example, the famous series “Why We Fight,” created by Hollywood in the service of the U.S. War Department and directed by Frank Capra, the renowned creator of such beloved and sentimental American movie classics as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Capra, an Italian immigrant and U.S. Army veteran who served during World War I, viewed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler as a unique global threat. Hitler’s primary propagandist was Leni Riefenstahl, a filmmaker. Understanding the power of film to persuade and evoke emotions, Capra was particularly worried about the effectiveness of Riefenstahl’s propaganda. Plus, he watched as wartime rationing sidelined most Hollywood production, sapping the American film industry of its own potential to persuade.

Capra and others in the film industry pushed the White House to mobilize Hollywood talent just as the government had mobilized other American industries, including car and textile production, in support of the war effort. American film, Capra said, could effectively counter Nazi messaging, and the impact could be as important as the building of fighter planes or production of military uniforms.

The idea, embraced enthusiastically by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his military chief of staff, George C. Marshall, was that such films could explain to recruits why they were being asked to go and fight in far-off lands. At first, the “Why We Fight” series was meant to be shown just in Army boot camps, but when Roosevelt screened an early entry in the series, he was so impressed that he ordered the government to pay for the rights to screen the films in free showings for all American moviegoers.

What was Capra’s message?

In “The Battle of Russia,” Capra drove home the theme that the Nazi assault on Russia was uniquely barbaric for two reasons: First, it was unprovoked. Second, it involved the dreadful tactic of laying siege to major cities and shelling civilian populations.

On an emotional level, the film made the case that the Russians were a stalwart people and that the United States could count on them as allies. Capra showed individual Russians in close-ups, including babushkas digging trenches and factory workers making munitions, and he showed civilians, including children, dying from indiscriminate shelling. He even showed a still image of a dead elephant at the Leningrad Zoo, killed by German bombs. In an eerie echo, the current Russian shelling of civilian areas in Ukraine led to reports about the trauma inflicted on the elephant in Kyiv’s zoo. (The animal was still alive at press time.)

By contrast, Capra depicted the Germans as faceless aggressors, shown only from behind or in groups. Through Capra’s lens, these German armies violated all standards of decency by reviving a medieval tactic of siege and engaging in bombing campaigns that killed innocent civilians. His most insistent indictment of the Nazi attackers was the shelling of noncombatants. Using actual footage supplied by the Soviet Red Army, Capra showed bombs falling night and day, followed by close-ups of dead men, women and children.

In Capra’s eyes in the 1940s films of “Why We Fight,” the Russians were to be admired for their determination to endure the brutal siege.

Today, the filmmaker would surely have cast the Ukrainian people in that heroic role, while the Russian army and its leader would be the brutal aggressors. In Ukraine, Zelensky — a figure straight out of a Capra movie, having been plucked from obscurity and thrust into a heroic role — is rallying his compatriots to stand firm. Meanwhile, Putin is playing the villainous role of the Hitler figure, launching a criminal assault on women and children. In one of the great ironies of European history, the Russians have effectively traded places with the Germans of World War II, by launching a ground war against a neighbor and using the brutal tactic of raining artillery down indiscriminately among civilians.

No one knows this better than the Russians, who endured the brutal German siege of Leningrad (now known as St. Petersburg) as well as Moscow, Stalingrad and other cities. Putin, as a native of Leningrad, probably heard horror stories about the siege that his family endured, so he should know even better than most about the suffering of civilians when they are attacked in war. He does not need Capra to remind him.

It is often said that when war comes, the first casualty is truth. But that does not mean all wartime communication is fake. Today, as the propaganda war rages, it may well turn out that the ultimate weapon in the information wars might just be the kind of truth Zelensky has been wielding in videos that show him alive in his office, not running away.

By Christopher B. Daly

Christopher B. Daly is a reporter, historian and professor at Boston University and the author of the prize-winning study of the history of U.S. journalism titled “Covering America.”